LIBRA was a poorly conceived project. It was a non-starter in the United States because it created multiple issues under the securities laws and the tax laws (not to mention a host of political issues). As Governor Brainard recognizes implicitly, LIBRA was not intended as a "stablecoin"; its value was linked to a variable, dynamic basket of currencies, so it would not have been stable.

The products that are genuinely powerful are true "stablecoins" that are linked to the dollar or…

A common issue underlies both this debate over the expansion of the definition of "accredited investor" and the debate over the expansion of broker-dealer fiduciary obligations to their customers.

That issue concerns the competence of individuals to make investment decisions. One side argues that individual investors are stupid and can't be trusted to evaluate information. (There is no shortage of evidence that individuals are ill-informed about the markets, economics, politics, the…

The political momentum towards the various states adopting their own fiduciary or quasi-fiduciary standards applicable to broker-dealers making recommendations to their clients appears somewhat inexorable, even if not well advised.

It is difficult to see how the economics work for a broker-dealer to make recommendations to individual clients, get paid only a transaction commission, and be deemed to be subject to a "fiduciary standard of utmost care." See Cadwalader Memorandum: . That…

In a world where every website is under potential attack from hostile nation states and from criminal organizations, why would one take the risk of gathering so much financial information in one place? The U.S. government has been successfully hacked; very sophisticated data companies have been successfully hacked; large financial institutions have been successfully hacked. There appears no obvious justification for accumulating so much financial information in a single location, as there…